Hydromecha's art Reviews on Newgrounds

[FF7 Pre-render style web home page]

Very cool! There really ought to be more prerendered 3D stuff on Neocities. Was the ghosting/trail on the ENTER text done in Blender or was that done with video editing sorta stuff? (which I guess could also count as Blender xd)

Coolfan23 responds:

cheers m8, yeah the 3d ghosting on the text was simply just rendering text in 3d then bringing that video file into any video program (I just happened to use Davinci Resolve) and duplicating the file a few times while offsetting the file in the timeline a few frames after the first, then just making the copies set to a blend mode like screen or something while lowering the opacity of eatch copy less and less till 0.

[Worm Science!]

Very cool stuff! The rim lighting on the worms is nice. Is that just using lights/materials or is there some other shader/post processing going on for that? I'm also curious how you made the carpet.

AVQ responds:

Thank you!! IIRC the rim light is just an area light behind them, though sometimes I do throw a fresnel on the shader or literally just paint lighting on in krita depending on the scene. That plus the heavy post processing with sharpening and everything makes it stand out extra. The carpet was just a plane with a hair particle emitter that I tweaked until it kinda had the look I wanted!

[Cupola and waterfalls loop]

Very cool! Are the mountains behind a transparent 2d sky backdrop there?

Kamikaye responds:

No, they are in a haze volume for a bit of depth. But sky plane would be cheaper to calculate though.

[90s Game Skeleton]

Nice! What sort of shader/compositing setup did you use to get this look?

Coolfan23 responds:

used blender to model a skeleton low poly, then made a forest and some other stuff like grass and such, then pixelized it by changing the render ratio to really low and making sure the render used on linear or cubic (cant quite remember this step been a few months), then went to gimp and mucked about with hue and value until I got some fun colors and then used some blend modes to finalize some of it

[MindChamber TradingCard]

Really cool stuff! What did you do to smooth out/cover up the print lines on the helmet?

MindChamber responds:

you can smooth out the print lines just by printing in pieces and at certain angles, after that, prime and you're good

[SUNRED!!☀️]

Good stuff! Really cool to see a fellow Sunred fan.

[Gaunt cyclops]

Really cool stuff! Was this based off of a mammoth skull at all? Kinda looks like it's got some similar features. It's wild that you're sculpting, UV unwrapping, hand painting, and even rigging all your stuff. I started messing with procedural textures to avoid unwrapping that but things just look way better when they're intentionally placed. When you do the high res sculpting is that actually modifying the mesh or is that more like painting on a normal map?

Seath-Lorkencrain responds:

The high res sculpting is done using the multiresolution modifier.

[bensons knob]

Very nice! The first one looks a little weird with how perfectly reflective Benson's head is. Maybe some roughness/opacity could fix it? Also, how much of this was sculpted vs polymodelling? I'm curious about the workflow.

Avovet responds:

Oh true that might've been a little bit better, I almost wanted to go with smudged or frosted glass but for some reason didn't. Also if you're interested its a little bit of both, everything other than the glass dome is polymodeled, as its way easier to just take a UV sphere, add a couple levels of multires, and then poke in the details. It's better not to stress out over modeling stuff thats just going to be a funny little gag

[RingCity Overview]

This is really impressive. Did you use any modifiers to place multiple buildings, etc. or was this all manually done?

Kamikaye responds:

THx :) I used particle emitting to place 6 buildings and 3 parks/tree-things all over the geometry. And 3 huge procedural clouds to make the haze/light shafts.